In the News

AZoCleantech speaks with Dr. Alper Bozkurt and Dr. Jay Levine from NC State. The pair teamed up to develop a system that monitors the movement of mussels. The opening and closing of bivalve mollusks can indicate toxins in aquatic environments. 

Robert Heath received the Innovator of the Year Award for his seminal work in signal processing and wireless communications. Fred Kish received the John S. Risley Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the success of multiple optical-communication technologies he’s helped commercialize. Kish‘s work has led to the launch of numerous telecommunications products, which have generated over $10 billion in total revenue.

North Carolina State University graduate and astronaut Christina Koch could be one of the first women on the moon. Koch is one of 18 astronauts named by NASA to train for its Artemis moon-landing program. The space agency is aiming for a landing by 2024.

Before she spent 328 days aboard – and sometimes outside – the International Space Station, Christina Koch spent five years at North Carolina State University.1 And as she prepares to deliver a commencement address to 9,100 NC State graduates in a virtual ceremony Friday evening, Koch (pronounced ‘Cook’) says NC State was about much more than the substantial physics and electrical engineering classes she took there.

Ryan Daugherty, a computer engineering student at North Carolina State University, catalogued the required installation process for a DTN ground node. This program repository and related documentation will simplify implementing new DTN ground nodes, making it more straightforward for new users to adopt DTN.

“Our goal was to create a research tool that can be used to help us better understand the behavior of different regions of the brain, particularly in response to various forms of neural stimulation,” says Yaoyao Jia, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “This tool will help us answer fundamental questions that could then pave the way for advances in addressing neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.”

In November 2014, researchers at North Carolina State University fitted cockroaches with electrical backpacks complete with tiny microphones capable of detecting faint sounds. The idea is that cyborg cockroaches, or ‘biobots’, could enter crumpled buildings hit by earthquakes, for example, and help emergency workers find survivors. ‘In a collapsed building, sound is the best way to find survivors,’ said Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University.

Astronaut Christina Koch, who graduated from NC State, was named to the Time 100 Most Influential People list.

A two-in-one software module could improve many applications built on top of popular deep learning architectures

In October 2019, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir exited the International Space Station and replaced a controller regulating the batteries that store the station’s solar power. But the two astronauts accomplished much more than fixing the space station. They completed the first all-female spacewalk, shifting who we see as strong, brave, competent, and who’s on the team pushing the boundaries of exploration.

Army-sponsored researchers, including NC State ECE’s Aranya Chakrabortty developed a reinforcement learning approach that will allow swarms of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles to optimally accomplish various missions while minimizing performance uncertainty.

Semiconductor design experts from industry and academia, including NC State’s Rhett Davis are this year’s winners of the Silicon Integration Initiative’s Power of Partnerships Award, recognizing the Si2 team that has made the most significant contributions to the field of electronic design automation.

A masking defense in a paper by Aydin Aysu could stop neural networks from revealing their inner workings to adversaries.

Each year the IEEE Power & Energy Society awards promising students scholarships through its Scholarship Plus Initiative. This year, one hundred and thirty-five students were selected from 78 U.S., Puerto Rico & Canadian universities, including 4 from ECE.

A hurdle that DNA data storage faces is finding a way to retrieve a specific file from a collection of records instead of every file in that collection, however attaching short labels to data sequences only yields 30,000 unique labels. NC State’s James Tuck is leading the solution increasing the number of labels to roughly 900 million.